A wholesome but lightweight story of a girl navigating a new environment.
Ten-year-old Fernsnickle Hooves arrives at her new “Home-School-Away-from-Home” in Miami and makes new friends at camp in Depner’s follow-up to The Everyday Adventures of Fernsnickle Hooves (2021).
Mrs. Peabody, the owner of the academy known as Oasis, gives newcomer Fernsnickle a tour of her sprawling new home and school after the girl arrives by train. Over cucumber and watercress sandwiches, Mrs. Peabody reveals that Fernsnickle’s recently deceased Grandma Rose was a domestic servant for the Peabodys after dropping out of school at age 16. (Whenever Fernsnickle is surprised at some good fortune, she remembers Grandma Rose, who used to say “you just NEVER know!”) The next morning, Fernsnickle meets fellow student Alison Peabody, who’s distantly related to Mrs. Peabody, and Capt. Whit, who takes the girls by boat to an island called Camp Colorado, located just off the Florida Keys. She gets annoyed by Alison’s quirks, and they inspire a deeply flawed idea for an entry in the Science Fiction Science Fair, which rewards imagination more than scientific know-how. Fernsnickle finds that the girls’ education is focused on studying their interests, creative projects, reading, and field trips. She starts the Girls Working Together for a Better World Club with her new friends, and they all enter a Talent Show, which sets up the third book in the series. Over the course of the book, Depner is adept at weaving in discussions of social issues; for example, Fernsnickle is quite forthright on educating others on the downsides of smoking, and there’s even a brief financial literacy lesson on saving and investing. She also visits shelters for people without homes, but the book might have been improved by more detailed and emotional observations about those living there. Overall, the book is fun and fast-paced. However, despite its complex plot, it suffers from a general lack of depth. The problems involving the Science Fiction Science Fair are resolved too quickly, for example, and aside from Alison, readers don’t really get to know any of the other girls at Oasis.
A wholesome but lightweight story of a girl navigating a new environment.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2022
ISBN: 979-8481318257
Page Count: 149
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style.
A summer vacation turns out to be anything but relaxing for Greg and a teeming horde of Heffleys.
Gramma declines the offer of a grand birthday celebration, saying that “what would make her REALLY happy is if everyone else went to Ruttyneck Island”—though she prepares individual packs of her legendary meatballs. (“You knew exactly how much Gramma likes you by how many meatballs you got.”) A gaggle of Heffley relatives and a dog stuff themselves into a small beach house, where overcrowding, personality conflicts, and simmering resentments become just some of the ingredients in a rolling boil of sitcom-style catastrophes, not to mention questionable decisions ranging from leaving the kids to make dinner unsupervised to labeling a cooler “HUMAN ORGANS” to keep random passersby from helping themselves. As usual, Greg supplies the setups in poker-faced journal entries interspersed with black-and-white drawings of slouched figures bearing frowny expressions of dismay or annoyance to cue the laffs. Gramma, it eventually turns out, not only (unsurprisingly) has plans of her own, but is also keeping a shocking secret about those meatballs. To go with the knee-slapping set pieces, Kinney slips in a tasty bit of family lore about how Greg’s parents met, plus droll takes on such low-hanging comedy fruit as restaurant manners, viciously competitive board games, and social media influencers (Greg being one, albeit with zero followers, and his Aunt Veronica’s little dog being another, with 3.8 million).
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781419766954
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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